Spatio-temporal Data Mining Techniques Research Articles

Identification and spatiotemporal evolution analysis of high-risk crash spots in urban roads at the microzone-level: Using the space-time cube method

The problem of urban crashes brings huge challenges and threats to local police and governments, especially in many cities in developing countries such as China. To reduce the frequency and severity of urban crashes, the local government in China has gradually taken interest in conducting detailed actions of traffic safety improvement at the microzone-level. Therefore, the primary goal of this study is to try a new method in spatiotemporal data mining techniques, the space-time cube method, to find high-risk crash spots at the spatiotemporal level and to obtain their spatiotemporal evolution patterns. The cumulative frequency curve method was performed to identify high-risk crash spots, and the contributory factors of forming these spots were analyzed by the latent class analysis method. The results showed that: (1) key parameters’ selection is crucial in the space-time cube construction; (2) the exit ramp gore point in interchanges, intersections, and entrances of neighborhoods were prone to have many high-risk crash spots at the spatiotemporal scale; and (3) locations with consecutive, persistent, and sporadic hotspots patterns need different risk monitoring strategies and traffic safety improvement. The feasibility and advantages of the space-time cube method in hotspots identification at the microzone-level were confirmed.

Towards a PS-InSAR Based Prediction Model for Building Collapse: Spatiotemporal Patterns of Vertical Surface Motion in Collapsed Building Areas—Case Study of Alexandria, Egypt

Buildings are vulnerable to collapse incidents. We adopt a workflow to detect unusual vertical surface motions before building collapses based on PS-InSAR time series analysis and spatiotemporal data mining techniques. Sentinel-1 ascending and descending data are integrated to decompose vertical deformation in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Collapsed building data were collected from official sources, and overlayed on PS-InSAR vertical deformation results. Time series deformation residuals are used to create a space–time cube in the ArcGIS software environment and analyzed by emerging hot spot analysis to extract spatiotemporal patterns for vertical deformation around collapsed buildings. Our results show two spatiotemporal patterns of new cold spot or new hot spot before the incidents in 66 out of 68 collapsed buildings between May 2015 and December 2018. The method was validated in detail on four collapsed buildings between January and May 2019, proving the applicability of this workflow to create a temporal vulnerability map for building collapse monitoring. This study is a step forward to create a PS-InSAR based model for building collapse prediction in the city.

Data-Driven Approaches for Spatio-Temporal Analysis: A Survey of the State-of-the-Arts

With the advancement of telecommunications, sensor networks, crowd sourcing, and remote sensing technology in present days, there has been a tremendous growth in the volume of data having both spatial and temporal references. This huge volume of available spatio-temporal (ST) data along with the recent development of machine learning and computational intelligence techniques has incited the current research concerns in developing various data-driven models for extracting useful and interesting patterns, relationships, and knowledge embedded in such large ST datasets. In this survey, we provide a structured and systematic overview of the research on data-driven approaches for spatio-temporal data analysis. The focus is on outlining various state-of-the-art spatio-temporal data mining techniques, and their applications in various domains. We start with a brief overview of spatio-temporal data and various challenges in analyzing such data, and conclude by listing the current trends and future scopes of research in this multi-disciplinary area. Compared with other relevant surveys, this paper provides a comprehensive coverage of the techniques from both computational/methodological and application perspectives. We anticipate that the present survey will help in better understanding various directions in which research has been conducted to explore data-driven modeling for analyzing spatio-temporal data.

Discovering private trajectories using background information

Trajectories are spatio-temporal traces of moving objects which contain valuable information to be harvested by spatio-temporal data mining techniques. Applications like city traffic planning, identification of evacuation routes, trend detection, and many more can benefit from trajectory mining. However, the trajectories of individuals often contain private and sensitive information, so anyone who possess trajectory data must take special care when disclosing this data. Removing identifiers from trajectories before the release is not effective against linkage type attacks, and rich sources of background information make it even worse. An alternative is to apply transformation techniques to map the given set of trajectories into another set where the distances are preserved. This way, the actual trajectories are not released, but the distance information can still be used for data mining techniques such as clustering. In this paper, we show that an unknown private trajectory can be reconstructed using the available background information together with the mutual distances released for data mining purposes. The background knowledge is in the form of known trajectories and extra information such as the speed limit. We provide analytical results which bound the number of the known trajectories needed to reconstruct private trajectories. Experiments performed on real trajectory data sets show that the number of known samples is surprisingly smaller than the actual theoretical bounds.

Mining periodic patterns in spatio-temporal sequences at different time granularities1

With the advancement of technology, it is now easy to collect the location information of mobile users over time. Spatio-temporal data mining techniques were proposed in the literature for the extraction of patterns from spatio-temporal data. However, current techniques can only extract patterns of the finest time granularity, and therefore overlooks potential patterns available at coarser time granularities. In this work, we propose two techniques to allow mining at different time granularities. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques are indeed effective and efficient for mining periodic spatio-temporal patterns at different time granularities.